That turns out to be a surprisingly difficult task. No one seems to have compiled a thorough list of every movie. The best I was able to come up with was a combination of IMDB and Box Office Mojo... the total?
~4,500.
That means this is much bigger project than intended. Even with no time frame, it suddenly got a lot more intimidating. I was expecting maybe 1,500 to 2000 - three or four movies a week over the course of the decade, which still "feels " correct to me.
Maybe when I start digging through that 4,500 list I will find a lot of TV movies, TV shows, shorts, cartoons, who knows what else.
Meanwhile:
Let's start with Tequila Sunrise (1988). I like to think that a good review should reflect the thing being discussed. Here, I'm just not sure what kind of tone to adopt to express my severe, severe disappointment. Here we have director Robert Towne (who wrote the Chinatown screenplay) helming a California crime film featuring Mel Gibson, Kurt Russell, and a life-size wooden doll of Michelle Pfeiffer. Bit players include J. T. Walsh and Raul Julia (among others). And yet... it's awful. Awful. Really bad.
Cardinal sin: it's boring. Nothing much happens, and it happens over and over and over again. People talk, and their speech is all cliches. And they talk some more. No chases. No gunfights. No action of any kind, really, until the very very end, and even then it sucks and is badly done. Mel Gibson seems off, colorless, zero charisma from Lethal Weapon. or its kin.
Kurt Russell is filling in for Pat Riley (!!!! not kidding), so he wears pricy suits and his hair slicked straight back in that oily arrogant Riley way. Other than his appearance, though, Russell also doesn't get to do much. He's given bad dialog, an unsympathetic character, and no real motivation to do anything he does. Ugh. He's a cop, and Gibson is a semi-reformed drug dealer, and they are supposed to be best buds from high school, but they have the general chemistry of, say, a vacuum cleaner and an old sandwich. That is, none whatsoever.
And Michelle Pfeiffer is the worst of all - I didn't call her a mannequin for nothing. She is barely there even in close up. Just completely hollow - no sex appeal (same problem goes for the men too, sorry ladies), no femme fatale, no mysterious allure, no quirks, just nothing. Black hole.
The movie made a lot of money - Wikipedia reports it made over $100 million - but critics more or less panned it. It holds a Rotten Tomatoes score of 44%, which is very generous.
On a totally different note, there is 1987's The Falling. The poster above is just amazing - a neo-Deco masterpiece. The film? Not a masterpiece. Not even close. It's from the vaunted "teens fight space monster" genre that's been around since the '50s, but really came to high relief in the '80s. Specifically, two movies from '88 come to mind - The Blob remake and Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Teens on vacation in Spain come across a space parasite that causes violent insanity. Don't space parasites always cause violent insanity?? Wouldn't it be much more interesting for them to cause, say, everyone to stop talking and start painting as well as Rembrandt? Or for everyone to suddenly speaking in funny '30s gangster accents? Or ANYTHING except violent insanity?
The movie is entirely predictable, and the few scary moments come usually from the good gore effects; someone studied a lot of years in latex school to create cow guts like that. The main characters are fairly dim (one is played by Dennis Christopher, from Breaking Away!) but likeable enough. The real joy of the movie is the high camp value - this is easily a film that could be screened by MST3K or Earwolf's How Did This Get Made? or Rifftrax, etc. etc. Lines are spoken in inappropriate deadpan, accents are placed on the wrong words in a sentence, reactions are out of control, you name it. It's great to mock, even watching solo.
Perhaps more interesting than the film itself are two related anecdotes. First, the original title for the film was Alien Predator (!), and it was filmed in 1984 but they held off on release in '87. Gee, I wonder why. Second, according to IMDB/Wikipedia (unsure who copied from the other), the producer was so pissed off at the lazy attitude of the production, causing it to go over budget, that he retired from films forever. Forever! This movie is so bad that it drove a man out of the industry for life.
Next up on the DVR: Lady in White and Married to the Mob, both from 1988. I think someone over at MGM HD just grabbed a handful of discs from the "1988" vault and put them up this week.
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